


The Mockingjay's Song

by FictionPenned



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Epilogue, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26977285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: Peeta has managed to shed most of the flour, but a white patch still lurks just in front of his ear. Katniss leans forward, half-intending to wipe it away, but she changes her mind at the last second, instead choosing to ruffle his hair and plant a kiss on his cheek. She has moved past the point of telling people who she loves to tuck in their little duck tails. The imperfections are the things that she remembers most fondly about the people that she has lost along the way, and if she ever loses Peeta, she wants to remember him this way — with flour on his face and the smell of bread on his breath and a slight sheen of sweat upon his brow.It would be a memory that speaks to the best of him. The loveliness of him. The peacefulness of him. The warmth of him. Her love of him. It’s a moment so poignant that Katniss could entirely lose herself in it, but a rumble of hunger in her belly pulls her back out of it again. “What are we having?”Written for Fic In A Box 2020.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 5
Kudos: 37
Collections: Fic In A Box





	The Mockingjay's Song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hmweasley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hmweasley/gifts).



The chill of autumn has begun to sink its teeth into District 12.  
  
Katniss shivers slightly as she sheds her father’s jacket and sets it aside on a nearby rock, followed quickly by her boots and her socks. A fish jumps in the middle of the lake, raising a small splash and sending concentric circles of ripples moving towards the shore. The very edge of the water laps at Katniss's exposed toes — ice cold and forbidding. If Peeta knew Katniss was planning to go swimming on a day like this, he would have told her off — or, at the very least, pursed his lips and stared at her disapprovingly — but this is her last real chance to find some peace before the weather turns.  
  
She takes a deep breath as she steps forward, bracing herself against the inevitable shock of the cold water. Goosebumps spread across her skin as the water pools around her ankles, but she quickly grows used to the temperature, and takes another step forward. It isn’t long before her feet have lost contact with the sand, and she paddles out to the lake's center and lays on her back, splaying her limbs wide as she floats and stares up at the sky.

Once upon a time, this was a secret place that she shared with her father. He taught her how to hunt here. They swapped songs and smiles and laughter. If there were ever sad times at this lake — tears shed in her father’s arms or fists clenched tight as she held back anger — then Katniss doesn’t remember them. It’s funny, how when someone dies, you slowly lose touch with the bad parts of them, and only hang onto the good bits. Her head is full of good memories of dead people. So full, in fact, that sometimes the dam breaks, and she finds herself completely overwhelmed, left with no choice but to drown in her grief.

Today is one of those days.

She fills her lungs with one, huge, teeming breath of autumn air and sinks. It’s hard to keep her eyes open beneath the water, and harder still to fight against her body’s natural tendency to float, but she likes the natural oblivion that exists beneath the surface of the lake. The water’s muddy. If there are fish swimming around her or plants reaching towards the surface, she can’t see them. The world is silt and filtered sunlight and nothing else. It’s a kinder world, a simpler one. One where there are no choices to be made aside from how long to stay.

The longer she lingers in that world, the more her chest burns, crying out for air.

Her heart thrums in her ears, a low rush of blood struggling to transport oxygen that it no longer carries.

She silently counts down the seconds, and when she reaches zero, she heads back towards the surface with a single, strong kick.

Sound is immediate. Her breaths gasp and heave, fraying against her throat and rubbing up against the inside of her chest. A mockingjay sings from somewhere unseen, repeating a short snippet of a song that it picked up from one of the many travelers that pass through these woods now that Panem is relatively peaceful. A breeze whispers through the canopy, shaking dead leaves loose from the trees. Katniss's hearing is stronger than it used to be, enhanced by the surgery that restored it, and she often resents the clamor. Her nerves are constantly straddling the edge of a knife. One wrong sound can send her body plummeting headlong into fear and terror and the memory of being hunted.

It has been a long time since the war, but she has never managed to shake the _feeling_ of it.

It haunts these woods, it haunts the Meadow, it haunts the walls of the home that she shares with Peeta. It haunts the puckered lines of her body where fresh skin was grafted over grisly burns. It haunts the primroses that line the flowerbeds beneath the kitchen window. It haunts the eyes of every person who looks at her — their gazes always filled with pity and skittishness and the unbearable weight of having witnessed her sins.

She is no longer Katniss Everdeen: the girl who brought illegal game to anyone who would buy it or Katniss Everdeen: the tribute or Katniss Everdeen: the Mockingjay, she’s Katniss Everdeen: the girl who was pushed so hard that she burned out.

That’s the official narrative, after all.

That she snapped.

That she was mentally disoriented.

That she didn’t know what she was doing.

But Katniss did know what she was doing when she changed her aim and loosed that arrow into Coin’s stone-cold heart. It was a conscious decision, made on behalf of Prim and Rue and all those who had suffered already, as well as all who would have suffered if the cycle was allowed to continue.

For the most part, however, Katniss plays along with the lie. It’s a lie that keeps her safe. It’s a lie that kept her off of the executioner’s block. It’s a lie that comforts those who might otherwise have shattered at the news. Most importantly, it’s an easier lie to tell than the story of star-crossed lovers had been all that time ago, and born from much stronger motives. She speaks the truth of this lie only when she’s alone with Peeta, or when the trees bend close enough to listen. She heard a mockingjay echo it once, passing the tale of “How Katniss Murdered A President” to all its friends.

Katniss didn’t mind the tattle-tale.

Hearing the bird speak her truth made the it feel real in a world that so often falls short. It helped her make sense of things. It helped her think a little clearer and breathe a little deeper.

Several strong strokes take her to shore, and as the breeze presses the cold water further into her skin, Katniss wishes that she had the foresight to bring a towel. In summer, she would have been able to lie out on a rock until she dried, but the autumn sun is far less kind. She settles for shaking herself like a dog and running up and down the shore until she feels like she shed most of the excess moisture. It’s a far from perfect solution.

As Katniss begins the long walk back home, she can feel the wetness gathering in her boots and trailing down her spine. No matter how quickly she walks, she cannot seem to get warm. Comfort sits just out of reach, and the closer she gets to home, the more her anxiety begins to pick at her. She knows that as soon as Peeta sets eyes on her damp hair, he’ll ask questions that she doesn’t want to answer. Someday they’ll find a balance between her independence and his protectiveness, but they have not quite managed to strike it yet. Not only are they still learning about each other, they’re still untangling their sense of self. Neither of them are the same person they were when their names were drawn. Change was inevitable, given the circumstances, and it did its work quickly, leaving them to wrest some sort of meaning from the mess it left behind.

The fence separating the District from the forest still exists, but it is largely perfunctory. There are gates nestled throughout its length now. Sometimes those gates manned and sometimes they aren’t, but either way, people are free to pass in and out as they please. Few people do — the forest doesn’t feel like home to people who have only known the comforts of the town — but Katniss goes out almost every day. It’s a far cry from the old days when she had to slip through a gap or climb up a high tree and drop down onto the other side.

Gale had to lift her up over his shoulders once. Once she would have thought fondly upon the memory, but everything involving Gale has been tainted by the man he became — hungry for victory at any cost, unwilling to compromise, thirsty for revenge. He represents everything that Katniss came to loathe about herself.

 _Good people never win the Games_.

Katniss won. Gale would’ve won, too, if his name had been pulled. He has the same skills she does, not to mention the same ruthless need to survive. And that’s why she had to let him go. There was too much common ground between them, too much blame, too much bitterness.

In the end, she stepped away from the war that she never wanted and into the soft, warm arms of peace.

Peace takes the form of a baker’s son.

Her socks are still wet when she steps through the front door, and she almost immediately drops to the floor to peel them from her feet. There are few things in the world more annoying than the feeling of wet wool squelching with every footsteps and few smells more cloying. Thankfully, however, the scent of fresh bread wafts through the air, tracing the walls and pooling in poorly ventilated areas on its way from the kitchen, drowning out the wet wool. It is a smell that rarely suffused her childhood home, but it has become increasingly familiar now that she and Peeta share a space and food is easier to come by.

Peeta bakes to keep his demons at bay, and his demons are just as active and violent as Katniss's own. Sometimes he paints, too, but the baking is more common.

Katniss hasn’t yet figured out what might squash her demons. She used to fill her days with hunting, but the feeling of a bow in her hands has been forever poisoned. Without the hunting, she lacks a hobby aside from wandering and thinking, and she doubts that either of those things qualify as proper hobbies. Prim would have sniffed and turned up her nose and told Katniss to try things until she found something that she’s good at, but Katniss already knows what she’s good at. Katniss is good at killing and only killing. No point parading through a string of failures in order to reach a foregone conclusion.

If she bothered to ask Peeta, he would tell her that maybe she should pursue her singing, but she never asks Peeta.

Not asking Peeta means that she can continue to pretend that she’s right.

“Hey,” Katniss says as she steps into the kitchen and pulls a chair out from beneath the table, dropping into it with all the grace of a bag of potatoes.

“Hey,” Peeta replies. There’s flour on his face and his hands and dusting the blonde tips of his hair, and when he turns to face her, his expression wrinkles almost immediately. His eyes linger on the wetness in her hair, the dirt on her bare feet, the look in her eyes. “It’s too cold for swimming,” he adds after a moment’s pause.

“It’s probably the last chance I’ll get before winter.”

Peeta does not press the point. He simply nods and turns back towards the counter, strong hands working a knot of dough.

“What are you making?” Katniss asks, the words timid and uncertain. She never knows what to do in these moments, how to fill the awkward silences, how to remind him that she appreciates him even when she showing it isn't easy. She’s been working on being friendly. Peeta’s easier to be friendly towards than most people. He’s kind and open and better than everyone else she knows. Better than any person has a right to be.

“Someone from District 8 passed along their bread recipe. I’m trying to replicate it, but it’s a challenge.”

“Honoring our new president?” Her voice lifts the end of the question as if it is a particularly clever joke, but Katniss is not entirely sure what the punchline would be. Certainly, she likes that the people were allowed to choose their leader, that Paylor understands what it means to grow up scared and impoverished, but the title will always taste bitter on her tongue.

“Something like that.” Peeta’s answer is aloof and evasive. There’s clearly a secret buried somewhere beneath it, and Katniss tilts her head as she tries to decide whether or not it’s worth uncovering. Whatever it is, he’ll probably let her in on it later. Peeta doesn’t hold onto secrets for very long. His candidness is one of the things she likes about him. She never feels like a pawn, never feels like a fool, never feels played when she’s with Peeta. Even when he’s angry, he doesn’t try to manipulate her. He just lets the emotion exist out in the open until they talk it through and it fades away. After spending too much time among officials and soldiers and Capitolites who never say what they mean or mean what they say, Peeta’s candor is refreshing.

It’s good to be loved, but it’s good to fight, too, and be able to solve those fights. Growing up, Katniss knew too many married people who let resentment devour them from the inside out. Of course, she and Peeta aren’t married, but they live like they are. They share a home and a bed and a quiet love that ebbs and flows between them like the ever constant shifting of the tides. She wouldn’t mind marrying Peeta, if things ever came down to it, but she doesn’t know if they will. They spent so long rushing through fake milestones in their love that it is hard to achieve the real ones.

The very idea of proposals seems odd now, a vestigial organ from a forgotten time, meant to be jettisoned if necessary.

Katniss exhales through her nose and stands. The feet of her chair scrape against the hardwood floor with a screech that makes them both start. “Sorry,” she says quickly before circling back around to the thing that she wished to announcement in the first place. “I’m going to bathe. I’ll be down for dinner. Good luck with your bread recipe.”

Peeta glances back over his shoulder. A soft smile whispers against the corners of his lips. “Try to leave some hot water for the rest of us.”

Katniss raises an eyebrow quizzically. “The rest of us?”

Peeta inclines his flour-dusted head towards the cat, who sits on the windowsill, as insolent as ever. If the horrible creature didn’t remind her of Prim, Katniss would have kicked it out long ago. The cat has never gotten on with her, and though he’s been a tiny bit less aggressive since her sister’s death, he is still far from affectionate. Katniss cares for him as best as she can, but he’s not _her_ cat.

That cat will always, _always_ belong to Prim.

Katniss lets out a bark of laughter. “We are not washing the cat. Last time we tried, he almost clawed my face off.”

“I thought the scars were fetching.”

“You always think I’m fetching.”

The pair swaps smiles as quickly and easily as they swap banter, and by the time Katniss finally drags herself up the stairs and towards the waiting bath, there is a bright pink flush on her cheeks that wasn’t there before.

When Katniss makes her way back into the kitchen, she is significantly less dirty and smelling vaguely of flowers, but equally damp. She is bundled in a hand-me-down sweater that’s slightly too big, and her wet hair is braided over her shoulder, the way her sister used to braid it. The braid is thinner than it was during her Games and her childhood, but her scalp is a slightly less arid place than it was immediately after the bombings. Some of the bald patches are growing back in, leaving wisps that slip loose from her braid and curl around her ears. Effie would have chided her for the mess, but Katniss doesn’t care, and she knows that Peeta doesn’t mind either.

Their brand of courtesy is founded less on rules and more on emotional intelligence.

It’s a system that works for them. Mostly.

Peeta has managed to shed most of the flour, but a white patch still lurks just in front of his ear. Katniss leans forward, half-intending to wipe it away, but she changes her mind at the last second, instead choosing to ruffle his hair and plant a kiss on his cheek. She has moved past the point of telling people who she loves to tuck in their little duck tails. The imperfections are the things that she remembers most fondly about the people that she has lost along the way, and if she ever loses Peeta, she wants to remember him this way — with flour on his face and the smell of bread on his breath and a slight sheen of sweat upon his brow.

It would be a memory that speaks to the best of him. The loveliness of him. The peacefulness of him. The warmth of him. Her love of him. It’s a moment so poignant that Katniss could entirely lose herself in it, but a rumble of hunger in her belly pulls her back out of it again. “What are we having?”

They split a pot of lamb stew flavored with plums. Once, this meal was an impossibility in the districts, however, with trade opening back up again, fruit and vegetables and meats have become more and more plentiful. There’s a market in the square on Thursdays, when a train brains in merchants from all over the country, and Katniss and Peeta always go together — walking between the stalls hand-in-hand as they search for the makings of this week’s meals.

Though Katniss has lost her taste for many of the trappings that define the Capitol, she has never lost the taste for the lamb stew. It is just as decadent today, made by Peeta’s hands, as it was when she first tried it. She finishes first one bowl and then another, sopping up the remnants with a bit of the freshly baked District 8 bread. It’s not her favorite of the bunch — that honor belongs to the hearty bread of District 11 — but it’s not bad, and it’s made even better by the rich juices of the stew. “I’d never stop eating this if I could get away with it, you know,” she remarks as she leans back in her chair.

“No one’s stopping you.” Peeta smiles, blowing on a spoonful of the stew to cool it. He eats slower than she does, more daintily. He savors every bite. Katniss still devours her meals like she’s not sure if she’s ever going to see food again. It’s a habit that she’s trying to break, but she never seems to make a dent in it. Her mind and her body haven’t seemed to realize that she doesn’t have to fight for survival anymore, that she is safe and provided for, and as such, it keeps on clinging to instincts that she no longer needs.

(At least she’ll be prepared if another war ever strikes.)

“I’m stopping me.” Katniss reaches out a hand, idly swirling her abandoned spoon around the edge of the bowl as she changes the subject. “I heard a mockingjay at the lake today.”

“Did it sing anything interesting?”

Katniss shrugs. “A snippet from a traveler, I think. Didn’t see whoever it was. They were probably long gone by the time I got there.”

“Did you recognize the song?”

Katniss shakes her head. “I still don’t know most of the songs from the other districts, and they’re always coming up with new ones.”

There’s a moment of quiet contemplation as Peeta pats his mouth with a napkin, blotting away an invisible mess. “You should learn them, write them down like we did with the plants and the people we knew.”

“Why?” Katniss asks. The question comes out a bit sharper than she intends it to be, but thankfully, Peeta doesn’t take offense.

“Songs are stories, aren’t they? They’re important to people. Someone ought to write them down, and holding a pen is a damn sight easier than holding a bow, I’d imagine. And besides, you’ve always liked singing. It’s a link to your father, isn’t it?”

Her first instinct is to spring to her own defense, to launch a dozen protests about how she shouldn’t be expected to be the person who writes things down, but her rage fades as soon as it begins. He’s not asking her to sing, not asking her to drudge up her own memories, just proposing that she fill her time by chronicling those of other people.

The more she considers the idea, the less repulsive it seems.

“I’ll think about it.”

Katniss buys a blank book on the next market day. Her gloved fingers are clumsy as she leafs through the pages, but she can already imagine the lyrics that will eventually fill the waiting void. She carries the book around for a few days while she gets used to the idea of it — slipping it into her bag while she goes out walking, weighing it in her hands when she stops to rest. These days, it’s difficult to summon up enough will to start a task, and easy to surrender to a numbing, grey routine of thinking little and doing nothing. Everything requires a bit of a run-up.

She finally starts to write during a week filled with nothing but driving, autumn rain that keeps her from her wandering. There’s a desk in the sitting room — built from pure mahogany, Effie would approve — and Katniss pulls up a chair, curls her feet beneath her, and begins to transcribe the many songs that her father taught her.

Words on the page feel somewhat less enchanting than hearing them sung, but it feels good to channel her memories into something meaningful, to channel her thoughts towards productivity, to keep her hands and fingers busy.

At some point, Peeta brings her a small plate of iced cookies. She works her way through them slowly and carefully, but she still manages to smudge a bit of paint on the corner of one page. For a moment, she contemplates ripping the mistake out and starting over, but she decides to leave it.

It adds bit of the magic back into the music.

Someday, someone reading this will know not only that the person who transcribed it loved the song, but that someone loved her, too.

Loved her enough to bake her cookies in the shape of pigs.

Loved her enough to keep her from sulking in a pit of her despair.

Loved her enough to keep pushing her to be her best self.

Even if no one remembers her name in that future, Peeta’s love will be pressed between the pages of this book, chronicled amidst the songs, and in this moment, that feels like the most important thing in the world.

Katniss takes a smaller, messier notebook into the forest with her on chilly afternoons as she listens for melodies being flung between the trees and their feathered residents. It’s not hard to find mockingjays if you know where to look. The birds sing her snippets of songs — a phrase here, a hum there — and Katniss jots down their basic shapes with notes that guess which district they might have originated from. Just like each district has their own distinct bread recipe, each one has their own sound. There’s a bit of overlap, but for the most part, there are patterns. Songs from District 4 dance and sparkle like the sea. Songs from District 2 are proud marches. Songs from District 12 are lively and full of light that you can’t find in the mines.

She goes from door to door in town, asking the residents for songs that they remember. Most of them are survivors of the District 12 bombings — people that Katniss has known all of her life. For the most part, they know all the same songs that she does, but there is an occasional straggler that stumbles into view. Greasy Sae teaches her a rhyme that was once used to teach children the sounds that animals make. Haymitch shares a drunken dirge that he picked up in a place that he was too drunk to remember, which does little to narrow the possibilities. Haymitch has been drunk _everywhere_.

There are some District 12 residents that were born elsewhere. Mostly District 13, but there are a handful of former District 7 and 11 residents thrown into the mix. District 13 didn’t have many songs — the culture was too rigid, too militaristic to allow the art to flourish — but Katniss emerges from those conversations with a handful of educational melodies. The family from District 11 teaches her the songs that they sung during the harvest — rich and full of heart — and she cannot help but remember Rue’s love for the mockingjays, and the song that meant she was safe. Once, Katniss would have been unable to tear herself away from the memory — lost forever to her grief and her guilt and a longing that things had turned out differently — but time has dulled the wounds. There is a small twinge in her heart, a small furrow in her brow, and she doodles a flower and a mockingjay in the corner of a page, and titles a song that has no name after her fallen friend.

It is not a song that anyone gave her.

It is a song that Katniss is writing herself.

She doesn’t know when she switched from dutifully recording other people’s songs to penning her own, but the transition happens so smoothly that she barely notices herself doing it.

Music seems like a good place to channel the emotions that lurk beyond her ability to find the right words.

There’s a song for Rue, a song for Prim, a song for her father, a song for her mother, and a song for Peeta.

It takes a long time to get them right. There’s a lot of crossed out words and hasty rewrites, but eventually, Katniss gets them to a place where they start to feel like real songs written by a real person, and not just the ravings of a lost girl forced to grow up far too quickly. Pride fills her chest for the first time in a long time, an emotion that’s become so foreign to her that it almost eludes identification. Feeling it once has her chasing for it over and over again. Ambition once itched in her veins — not a thirst for power, but a competitive edge — and though it died in the wake of her first Hunger Games and the conflicts that followed, she can feel it flaring to life again.

She may no longer be The Girl On Fire, but Katniss Everdeen is nursing a spark of inspiration.

On a dark, cold night, a couple sparks can mean the difference between life and death, and for the first time in a long time, Katniss Everdeen feels _alive_.

Katniss almost forgets about the secret that Peeta held back on the night he proposed that she beginning keeping the history of songs, but it begins to worm its way back into their conversations in subtle ways.

They are pressed together beneath a pile of blankets — wrapping their shared body heat tightly around them to keep out the burgeoning winter chill — when Peeta asks, rather suddenly, “Katniss, what’s your favorite season? I don’t think I ever asked.” It is a question with motive, that much is obvious, but Katniss knows better than to attempt to guess what it might be. She isn’t good at that, and he always tells her things eventually, but she must admit, whatever secret Peeta currently holds, he’s been gnawing at it for much, much longer than usual.

Katniss tries not to dwell on it. It’s probably not _that_ important, especially if it is grounded in things as trivial as bread experimentation and favorite seasons.

Though it’s not a particularly difficult query, it takes her a moment to settle on an answer. “Spring, I think.”

Truthfully, Katniss is fond of almost every season. Winter is the only exception, by nature of the manner in which she grew up. As the major provider of fresh game for both her family and a scattering of other District 12 residents, winter was the hardest season in which to hunt. It meant shorter daylight hours, shorter windows of opportunity, skinnier game, a bracing cold that no gloves could protect her from. So much pain and suffering for so little payoff. Spring, however, is the opposite of winter. It promises new life. The days get longer. The birds start to sing again. Leaves grow back and provide decent cover. Animals flit about both excitedly and blearily, and both of those conditions promise easy prey. She is glad that the forest that dominated the Arena during her first Games existed outside of the confines of any familiar season. It kept her woods from becoming even more tainted than they already were.

“You don’t sound confident,” Peeta teases. A wry smile plays about the corners of his mouth, and Katniss raises a single finger, poking him right in the crease of one of his dimples.

“Well, I am.” There’s more strength behind the words this time, but it is not a strength rooted in certainty, just a strength rooted in sheer stubbornness.

Katniss has always been disagreeable.

Or, at least, she has _mostly_ been disagreeable.

Despite her best efforts, people keep slipping past her ironclad walls and catching sight of the flawed, damaged, occasionally charming person that lies beneath. Gale, her mother, Prim, Cinna, Effie, Haymitch, Peeta, Finnick, Joanna — the list looks like a long one until you realize that half the people on it are dead now…or gone from her life in other ways.

Peeta’s seen the most of her, and she’d like to think that she’s seen the most of him. Not in a physical sense, though they’ve shared that, too, but in an emotional one. They have lived through each other’s darkest moments — the madness, the nightmares, the depression, the painfully slow act of healing — and they have forgiven each other for them. They are burned, they are scarred, they are complicated, but they have also promised to help each other find peace.

There are some days when it is difficult to know what peace looks like, when fear closes its fist around them and squeezes tightly, but those days have gotten fewer and farther between. Time helps the immediacy of grief fade away, and hobbies help keep the hands and the mind from growing idle enough to slip into familiar patterns and old habits. Peeta has always had his baking, and now, despite her initial opposition to the idea, Katniss has her little book of songs.

“What’s your favorite season?” Katniss returns the question as she rolls over, adjusting slightly so that her head lies more comfortably against Peeta’s shoulder.

Peeta sighs, and his warm breath tickles the curve of Katniss's ear. Reflexively, Katniss wrinkles her nose.

“It depends,” he says. His thumb begins to draw idle series of overlapping circles on the outside of Katniss's arms. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s tracing flower petals. Flowers are a constant presence in their lives. Primroses line the perimeter of their flower beds, daisies mark the top of Peeta’s sugar cookies, sprigs of heather lurk on the bathroom counter — every flower except for roses has a standing invitation into their home. Katniss cannot think of roses without tasting fear and rage and blood in the back of her mouth.

The last rose left within these walls was a gift from President Snow after the bombing — a snide declaration of war.

Peeta knows this, of course. He knows everything. As such, the invisible flower he’s drawing is the childish sort, born from ease of shape rather than any real concept of species.

“Winter,” he continues, speaking slowly as he turns his thoughts into words, “Is the best time for baking. Being around ovens is hot business, you know, but I liked the colors of fall the best.”

“All that orange. Like a sunset.” Katniss smiles, proud that she has remembered that little fact about him. It has been a long time since they first spoke on the topic of favorite colors, and they’ve come a long ways since then. For starters, Katniss actually loves Peeta. She isn’t just pretending anymore.

The heat and the warmth and the fondness is all real.

All her.

All them.

Embarrassment flushes her cheeks, and she coughs as if she feels compelled to compensate for some sort of slip. Katniss knows that Peeta cannot read her mind, technically speaking, but he has always been eerily good at guessing what she’s thinking. He has a natural instinct for reading people that Katniss has never been able to master, despite Effie’s many, many lessons. It is both comforting and disconcerting. To have your weaknesses balanced by someone else’s strengths means that you admit to exposing your vulnerabilities and trusting that they will not be wielded against you.

Katniss has never been good at establishing that trust, but she cannot deny that Peeta has earned it.

She has been opening herself up slowly, making a conscious effort to be the kind of partner he deserves. Sometimes that means sharing a joke or a smile, sometimes it means volunteering to feed the cat, sometimes it means answering questions about your favorite season, and sometimes, it means remembering his favorite color. Even the tiniest victories are meaningful.

“Like a sunset,” Peeta confirms.

“There aren’t any good songs about sunsets,” Katniss comments a beat later. It isn’t a realization that she’s made before, but despite all the people that she’s talked to, the pages upon pages of lyrics that she’s dutifully recorded, she cannot recall a single line about sunsets.

“The someone should write one,” Peeta says, as though it is the obvious conclusion.

Katniss stares at the crackling fire set into the wall across from them, brows furrowed as she wonders whether or not she could possibly succeed in setting a sunset to music for him — capturing the light and the color and channeling it into sound.

It seems beyond her current abilities, but if she keeps practicing…

She burrows further beneath the blankets, hiding both her face and her plans from Peeta. “Maybe they should.”

A light snowfall dusts the ground of District 12.

Its surface froze over in the night, and Katniss's boots crunch through its icy surface with every step. It would not be a good day for hunting, but she is not in the forest for hunting. Instead, she is in the forest for its privacy. Though months have passed since that autumn day when she sunk beneath the surface of the lake and lost herself in the chill of the water and the thrall of her sadness, most of the people of the reforged District 12 still avoid the forest. A couple of the younger girls have begun to learn how to fire arrows, wanting to learn how to hunt in order to both help their community and be like Katniss, but for now, those lessons are still confined to targets set up in the Meadow. Peeta teaches them. Haymitch helps whenever he’s sober enough to conceptualize a straight line. Katniss has ventured no closer than the shade of the willow tree, eyeing them from a comfortable distance. She still cannot bring herself to lift a bow, nonetheless teach somebody else how to fire one.

Perhaps someday that will change. Perhaps the clouds of her fear will begin to part just as surely as the clouds of her grief have begun to part, but it will take time. She’s not sure how much time, but she is guessing that she might have a few grey hairs and a few more lines on her face by the time her heart stops racing and her hands stop shaking at the very idea.

Thankfully, both Peeta and Haymitch know better than to rush her.

Katniss's bag bumps against the side of her leg as she walks, heavy with the weight of both of her notebooks. A couple of pens rattle in the bottom of the bag, and, too late to do anything about it, she remembers that she meant to wrap them in a sock. One had broken a couple weeks back, staining both the inside of the bag and the covers of her books. The pages managed to escape relatively unscathed except for a bit of bleeding at the edges, but she doubts that she would be that lucky if it was to happen a second time.

She stops in the middle of the path, pulls out one of the troublesome pens, uncaps it with her teeth, and scribes “sock” in angry, spiky letters on the inside of her palm. She takes a minute to blow on the ink to dry it before capping the pen again and shoving it in the back of her hair, where it might be able to stay out of trouble.

It isn’t much longer before Katniss reaches the lake. The plants around the shoreline rustle in the breeze — the only green in sight. It is not quite cold enough for the lake to ice over, but she can see the beginnings of ice begin to form in shallower spots, a faint spiderwebbing that glints whenever the sun shyly ventures out from behind a cloud. It wouldn’t be able to support so much as a frog’s weight, but for a flickering moment, Katniss thinks fondly about a story someone in the Capitol once told her about the joys of ice-skating. It sounded like a fun, laugh-filled sort of adventure — the sort of joy denied to the people of the Districts for generations — but perhaps, if Katniss can learn more about it, she could try to bring it here.

Ice-skating in District 12. Imagine that.

Katniss shrugs her bag off her shoulder and sits cross-legged on a flat rock, looking out upon the lake. Behind her, she hears the flutter of a mockingjay’s wings as it leans in close to listen. She doesn’t know if the birds in these woods are smart enough to remember faces, but it seems like they’ve started to recognize her, to pass the word along when she’s in their territory, to gather and learn a new song.

She remembers how the mockingjays always got quiet when her dad sang to them when she was a child, how they listened until he was done and then echoed the words back in a rousing round of applause.

Her dad had a better voice than she does, but she likes to think that she isn’t half-bad.

She is better than Peeta, at any rate. The boy has a singing voice that would curdle milk, which is surprising, since Katniss likes listening to him talk.

It takes her a moment to settle in. She slides both books out of her bag, frees the pen from her braid, and takes a few deep breaths. First, she cracks open the book in which she keeps the songs of others. Shakily at first, and then more strongly, she begins to sing a song from District 9. It’s a joyful song about people coming together to celebrate the harvest.

Around her, the water ripples, the bare trees lean in close, and the birds quiet.

The world is listening to her sing.

When Katniss finishes, and the song fades into silence, the mockingjays chatter back at her, repeating overlapping melodies from the song, the snippets that they each remember. She turns over her shoulder and smiles at them, scattered throughout the branches of the trees. Mockingjays travel in flocks. You never see one without a handful of others. They bring their friends and family everywhere, build their own little chorus.

“Do you want to hear something else?” she asks them, knowing full well they won’t answer back.

They ruffle their wings and move to lower branches and continue to echo the song.

“All right, all right,” she replies, feigning acquiescence as she closes the first book and opens the other. The one that contains her words. Her songs. Her story. “Don’t tell anyone about this one though. It’s secret.”

The mockingjays know nothing of secrecy — _what need does a songbird have for privacy?_ — but as soon as she begins to sing again, they once again grow silent. Birds are exceptionally good listeners when they want to be. Katniss is not entirely confident in this song yet. It needs more work before she will be able to share it with anybody who might be a more critical audience than a bird — if, indeed, she ever dares to sing it to somebody else — but it is hard to figure out what bits of it need fixing if she doesn’t sneak out into the middle of nowhere and sing it every once in a while. Wrapping her tongue around the words is the best way to find the unfinished edges, the beats that don’t quite line up, so when she starts, she tries her best to chase the nervousness from her voice.

_The odds exist to prevent this,_

_She thinks as the name is shared_

_But clear as a bell in this crowded hell,_

_Her sister’s name rings through the air._

_There’s a break in her voice as she makes her choice_

_And enters a war she can’t bear to lose._

It is far from becoming a perfectly polished song. It has the roughness that is characteristic to a beginner’s touch, but it’s written from the heart, and she has a sharp enough ear to root out the problems and try to fix them — a word here, a note there, a breath somewhere in the middle — until it eventually becomes listenable.

And besides, the mockingjays aren’t picky.

The verses continue to walk through the story of her first Hunger Games. It is full of the fear, the uncertainty, the pageantry, and it is only when she reaches the last two lines that she becomes aware of its weight.

_There’s a few quick plans and berries change hands_

_And creates a love that she’ll never lose._

There is a moment of polite waiting as the birds make absolutely sure that Katniss has finished her song, but once a few heartbeats pass, they break into excited mimicry. However, there’s one sound that surprises her. From somewhere just beyond Katniss's field of vision rises the enthusiastic applause of a single person.

Katniss panics, scrambling for a weapon she doesn’t have, and she stumbles off the rock. Only a combination of quick reflexes and dumb luck keeps her from landing in the icy lake. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” she snaps at the intruder as he emerges from the trees — all blonde hair and broad shoulders and knowing smiles.

“Sorry,” Peeta replies, smile continuing to linger, if a touch more contrite than it was a moment ago. “Couldn’t help it.”

Katniss breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth as she tries to quiet her racing heart, a technique that a doctor in District 13 taught her a long time ago. She isn’t always sure whether or not it helps, however, it has become thoroughly entrenched in her habits. When she feels like she can think again, when the world is no longer reduced to the narrow lens of fear and burgeoning darkness and her throbbing pulse, she asks, “What are you doing out here?”

Peeta is one of the few people who knows where the lake is. She showed him its location about a year ago, when they were playing real or not real and reacquainting themselves. It took days for her to work herself up to inviting another person into this sacred space, but she took comfort in the fact that Peeta would not defile it.

Besides, he rarely ventures out into these woods.

Which makes his presence here _especially_ odd.

“I was looking for you,” he says, as though it is the most natural thing in the world.

Katniss quirks an eyebrow, seeking elaboration, and he obliges.

“There’s a festival in the square tonight. When I saw that you’d left, I figured you’d forgotten.” Bright eyes dash down to the books spread haphazardly across the rock. “I know time is hard sometimes. I came to remind you, and to see whether or not you’d like to go together.”

It is a reasonable enough explanation, and Katniss does not detect so much as an inkling of a lie buried within it. That’s not surprising. It doesn’t align with the rest of his secrets. “Thanks,” she says as she bends down and begins to gather her things, shoving them back into the confines of her bag. “Would’ve been out here most of the day if you hadn’t reminded me.”

Peeta’s feet shift slightly, and he clasps his hands behind his back as he watches Katniss gather her things. “I liked your song,” he comments after a lengthy pause. When Katniss doesn’t reply, he continues, tacking on a small joke to lessen the tension. “Could use more sunsets though. I remember you saying something about there are no songs with sunsets.”

When all her things are packed away, Katniss pulls her bag back over her shoulder and sets off down the well-trodden path by which she came. Her footsteps no longer crack with every step, but the snow squeaks ever so slightly as the soles of her boots pack it down. Without casting so much as a glance at Peeta, she grumbles a half-hearted threat. “If you ever mention this to anybody else, I’ll kill you.”

“Noted.”

It’s not a promise, and he doesn’t sound the slightest bit cowed in the face of the threat, but Katniss will take I what she can get, given the circumstances.

After a few more steps, Peeta adds, “I mean it, you know. I would have given it a standing ovation had I been sitting down.”

Katniss ignores him, and their shared walk back to the fence and the town beyond lapses into a comfortable, familiar silence, interrupted only by the occasional song of a mockingjay as it echoes the melody of the last phrase of her song.

_And creates a love that she’ll never lose._

By the time Katniss writes of sunsets, winter has finally begun to thaw.

Trees and bushes have begun to sprout buds, bulbs are poking their green heads out of the dirt in their garden, and it is no longer so cold that Katniss needs to bundle up whenever she ventures outside. She has been spending less time in the forest lately and more time in the Meadow, trying not to think of the graves that lie beneath the field of windblown grass. She has been sitting on hills, watching sunset after sunset and trying to think of the words and melodies that best capture the general feeling of it. It’s terribly difficult; not only because sunsets are rather abstract affairs, but because every single one is different. Sometimes the sky glows pink. Sometimes a storm slinks across the horizon, interrupting the sun’s last rays with a purple shadow. Sometimes she sees the deep oranges that Peeta fancies, but not always.

It is hard not to think of how often a sunset looks like fire, ready to sweep across the landscape at a moment’s nervous and consume the unwitting people who dare to populate it.

The last time she saw a sky full of fire, she lost her sister, and she and Peeta burned.

She runs a finger over the skin of her ankle that peeks out from below a pair of pants that are badly in need of a good tailor, tracing the stark lines that mark the contours of her burns and the myriad grafts that tried to save her.

For all of the guilt that she carries, she _is_ glad that she escaped death on that day, The bright flash of fire that took her sister would not be a kind last impression of the world, burned onto her retinas for all of eternity.

She doesn’t know what her last sight will be, her last taste, her last smell, but as she stares out across the expanse of the Meadow, drinking in the too-complicated palette of the sky, she thinks that a sunset would not be the worst note upon which to leave.

That very thought births an idea, a phrase, a melody, and Katniss begins to write her song for Peeta.

Peeta has a woven basket tucked into the crook of his elbow when he asks Katniss if she wants to picnic with him.

Katniss looks up from work with surprise, brow furrowing as she takes in the basket, the sleight shaking of his hands, the hesitation of his smile. “Where are we going?” she asks once her gaze has absorbed all that it can, loathe to leave the comfort of their home without knowing exactly what destination they have in mind.

“I was thinking the lake. It’s a good quiet spot, and we know we’ll have decent guardians in the trees,” he comments, speaking of the flock of mockingjays that have grown more and more fond of Katniss with every song. She has taken to asking Peeta for bits of stale bread to scatter for them, and they are always overjoyed at the new food. Peeta took no issue with the practice after she told him what it was for. Indeed, he has begun keeping an extra bowl on the counter, designated specifically for mockingjay food. It is a luxury that she would have never had before the war, when food was scarce and every morsel was important, but these days, everyone in the outlying districts gets more than enough to eat, and such small indulgences are not nearly as wasteful as they once were.

Katniss runs her tongue across her lips as she considers the proposition. It is an usual one, but the weather has been warm, the forest is imbued with the joy of spring, and green leaves have once again consumed the landscape. There are far worse ways to spend an afternoon than spread out across a picnic blanket with someone that you love.

After a moment, she nods. “Okay.”

Peeta beams, and though his nervousness is not gone, it is far less overwhelming than it had been mere seconds ago.

“Let’s go.”

The basket contains Katniss's favorite foods: the lamb stew with plums that she first tasted in the Capitol, the goat cheese that was a rare treat back when Prim kept a goat, the iced cookies that Peeta piped elegant designs upon. She turns one of these cookies around idly in her hands, looking at the way the lines cross and intersect, forming a pattern that could be either lace or a the intricate webbing of an artistically inclined spider. It almost seems a shame to eat it, but Peeta assured her a long time ago that the ephemerality of the art is part of the joy of it. ‘Something that lasts for a moment is just as important as something that lasts forever, and besides, if you don’t eat it, it’s an affront to the baker.’ Still, she nibbles around the outside of the cookie until she has no choice left but to bite into the design and destroy it. Stubbornly delaying the inevitable, as always.

Peeta barely eats. Instead, he leans back on his hands and stares out at the glassy surface of the lake, shaking his good foot as he thinks about whatever thought has been gnawing at him for the past several months. Katniss wonders if this is the day when she’ll finally learn his secret, or if she’ll have to wait a bit longer. They had spoken of spring in one of those strange conversations, but she does not know how relevant that might be to whatever it is that he is planning. Perhaps she had given the wrong answer. Maybe she was supposed to say autumn, like he did.

Unfortunately, it’s too late to turn back now.

When she’s finished eating, she stifles a burp and mirrors his posture, silently surveying the lake, the ruined house, and the trees that cluster tightly around it, forming a natural barrier that cuts them off from the rest of the world.

“I have something for you,” Peeta says quickly, wiping his sweat-soaked palms on the fabric of his trousers before reaching into the basket and pulling out an elegantly designed cookie tin. A map of Panem is painted upon the lacquered surface. Not Panem as it was during the the era of the Hunger Games, but Panem as it was before. Panem as it will someday be again.

Katniss quirks a single dark eyebrow. “I didn’t know I was getting presents.”

“Open it,” Peeta insists, gently depositing it into her lap.

The tin is heavier than it looks — whatever it contains, it must be full to bursting — and with no small amount of hesitation, Katniss leans forward and begins to ease off the lid.

It’s a touch stubborner than it was likely meant to be — thwarted by both the unseasonably warm temperature and the steady ravaging of time — but eventually, Katniss works it free. Sitting on a bed of gold napkins, is a selection of breads. It takes her a minute to work out what she is looking at, but eventually, after a bit of counting and the recognition of the breads that they shared with Finnick, Johanna, and Beetee on the beaches of the second Arena, the assortment begins to make sense.

One bread for every district.

Each one is different, and they speak to the needs and resources of the people who made them. District 4 bread is salted. District 11 bread is hearty. District 12 bread — the bread that she grew up with all her life — is made from the ingredients that can be obtained from the simple ingredients provided by the tesserae. There are no additives to District 12 bread because most people had nothing. It is bread made for a purpose, not for pleasure, but it sparks a familiar warmth in her chest all the same.

“I see your experiments paid off,” she says with a smile, picking up the notoriously stubborn District 8 loaf in her hands and turning it over, trying to see what about it makes it trickier than any of the others, but she does not have the practiced eye that Peeta does. Baking lies beyond her. Prim was always better at preparing food. Katniss is just the one who goes out and catches it. Sometimes that meant shooting a rabbit or bartering for a goat, but it also meant taking out tesserae, entering extra copies of her name into the Reaping to prevent the odds from going against Prim’s favor. Not that it really mattered in the end, of course. Somehow Effie’s carefully fingers found the single paper bearing the name Primrose Everdeen in the entire bowl. Prim could’ve taken tesserae all she wanted, and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

Katniss still would have volunteered to take her sister’s place.

Peeta’s elbow gently nudges her side. “You should pull apart the District 12 bread.”

Katniss glances up at him, glaring at him suspiciously through eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Why?”

“Because.”

One word answers are decidedly unhelpful things, but with a disapproving huff, Katniss replaces the District 8 bread in the basket and pulls out the most familiar piece of bread. She holds it to her nose and smells it once, remembering evenings spent huddled around the table with her mother and Prim, the few scattered times when she had a full belly and sopped up her stew with small chunks of bread.

Still nursing the flicker of nostalgia, she rips into it with her fingers, and a shiny object falls into her lap.

Her heart stops.

Her mind races.

It takes her a moment to understand what’s happening.

She left all thoughts of marriage behind her in the Capitol. Her relationship with weddings was largely one of farce and deception, a bit of pageantry to be agreed in order to keep all the people that she loves safely out of harm’s way. Even though she and Peeta have been living together for a while, sharing a bed, lurking steadfastly at each other’s sides both in sickness and in health — the idea of engagement simply had not occurred to her.

Lips parted in a silent gasp of awe, she sets the bread aside and picks up the ring, turning it over in her hands. It’s a small thing, much simpler than anything the people in the Capitol would have worn. It is a band of beaten, aged gold with no stone set into it, the same color as the Mockingjay pin that became first her trinket and then a sign of the rebellion.

Gold was their team color during that second Hunger Games.

Gold for her pin.

Gold for Effie’s hair.

Gold for Haymitch’s bracelet.

Gold for Peeta’s locket.

Gold for working together to defeat the real enemy.

She is so entrenched in her fascination that she almost doesn’t hear the question.

“Katniss, will you marry me?”

A bright smile breaks across her face, full of a joy that she hasn’t felt in a long time. She practically flings herself upon him, wrapping her arms around Peeta in a tight embrace and accidentally pitching them both into the lake.

When they pop up from beneath the surface, blinking water out of their eyes, brushing sodden hair away from their face, and stifling a burst of shared laughter, Katniss offers up an enthusiastic “Yes.”

Their wedding is not nearly as ostentatious an affair as their fake wedding in the Capitol would have been.

They invite only a handful of people — friends and family who they trust — and Katniss rents a dress in the way District 12 women always has, a dress a dozen other women have gotten married in. Of course, the bombing destroyed the courthouse and the old stash of wedding dresses, but Katniss has since replaced them with her own wardrobe. Everyone in the District is married with Cinna’s blessing, garbed in bright colors that reflect the joy of the occasion.

They sign the appropriate documents at the makeshift courthouse in handwriting that shakes with joy and fluttering nerves.

Peeta’s signature is almost illegible, but since a witness signs their approval, it is admissible anyway.

They swap a vow and a kiss, and that afternoon, they crouch in front of a fire and toast bread together, watched by their small wedding party. It is an intimate, quiet practice, born of a promise to share the food on your table and the comfort of your home and to care for your partner no matter what difficulties might cross your path.

Thankfully, for Peeta and Katniss, it seems that the worse events of their lives are behind them.

They need only look forward to a peaceful future, and the slow rebuilding of both the world and their spirits.

They sneak away from the music and the dancing once the sun begins to set, climbing hand-in-hand onto the roof of their home. As a maneuver, is a great deal more difficult than climbing onto the roof of their apartments in the Capitol, but it is no less rewarding.

Katniss slips her hand into Peeta’s as they sit side-by-side on the warm shingles, laying her head upon his shoulder as they stare out into the west at the setting sun.

The sky blazes orange — the brightest orange that she has ever seen — as if it knew that Katniss and Peeta would be watching it and wanted to put on a show.

And, quietly, Katniss begins to sing.

It’s a song of grief and loss. Of girls on fire and bodies burned in a firestorm. It’s a song of blazing hope in the face of oncoming darkness, and the love that carried them safely through hundreds of long nights. It’s a song of sunsets and the many promises that they carry within them.

It is not a perfect song, but their love isn’t perfect either, and as Katniss's voice fades into silence, Peeta squeezes her hand and offers a quiet, “How could anyone not fall in love with you?”

Somewhere out in the distance, a mockingjay picks up the tune and carries it off towards the forest, so that dozens of its friends can learn it, too.

Someday, Katniss will teach the song to her children, and one of them, the youngest, the one with hair as flaxen as Prim’s will copy it into the proper book alongside songs that have been passed from generation to generation for so long that people no longer remember who wrote them, and Katniss's song and Peeta's love of sunsets will become part of that small, specialized account of the history of the Panem and the people who dare to live in it.


End file.
